Add to Portfolio

Gregg Matthews for The New York Times

Ruth Fertel

Mr. Miller, 57, the chief executive of Ruth’s Chris Steak House, was referring to the company’s founder and guiding spirit, Ruth Fertel, who had died two years earlier. In New Orleans, where she lived most of her life, Ms. Fertel was a legendary restaurateur. In 1965, then a divorced mother raising two sons, she mortgaged her home to buy a New Orleans steakhouse and turned it into one of the city’s enduring institutions.

“My mother knew that taking care of people in a warm, comfortable way was going to sell steaks,” her son, Randy Fertel, told me.

She was also no slouch as a businesswoman. With no formal training, but plenty of smarts and ambition, she transformed her steakhouse into an upscale restaurant chain. Ruth’s Chris was a rare example of a vibrant, growing national company in a city that never had much of a business culture. In 1999, when she was 72, Ms. Fertel sold Ruth’s Chris to a private equity firm for $160 million.

Mr. Miller arrived five years later, at a time when the company was struggling, with a mandate to right the ship so that Ruth’s Chris could be taken public. This he did so successfully that the company completed its I.P.O. less than 18 months later, giving the company a market capitalization of $400 million. That happy event took place on Aug. 9, 2005. Three weeks later, Hurricane Katrina hit.

Everyone in New Orleans knows the rest of this story. Mr. Miller and his management team evacuated to Orlando, Fla. Other New Orleans business owners also had to leave town, of course — setting up temporary quarters in Dallas or Houston or Atlanta

But within days of the levees bursting, Mr. Miller announced that Ruth’s Chris wasn’t coming back, making his the first company to abandon the wounded city. Ever since, people have been asking a variation of Mr. Miller’s question: “What would Ruth have done?”

FORTY years before Katrina, barely three months after Ms. Fertel bought what was then known as Chris’s Steak House, Hurricane Betsy ripped through New Orleans. With no electricity, and thousands of pounds of meat in warming refrigerators, Ms. Fertel cooked steaks on gas grills and handed them out to victims and relief workers.

When embittered New Orleanians think about what Ruth would have done, that is what they have in mind. She would have stayed, they’re convinced, and helped rebuild the city she loved. “Loyalty would have been at the top of her list of paramount virtues,” James Ryder, a former accountant at Ruth’s Chris, told New Orleans City Business. Describing the timing of Mr. Miller’s announcement as “pretty callous,” he added, “I don’t think the executives appreciate how strongly Ruth felt about keeping the company here.”

Tom Fitzmorris, who has a local radio call-in show devoted to food, told me that even now, he still gets calls from listeners who vilify Ruth’s Chris for moving its headquarters. There are locals who won’t eat at the suburban Ruth’s Chris that has since reopened. (The flagship steakhouse, in Mid-City, was so badly damaged that it is unlikely to ever reopen.) “There are a group of people who are furious at Ruth’s Chris,” said Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian and author of “The Great Deluge (William Morrow, 2006).”

Yet Mr. Miller makes no apologies for what he did. “I’ve never second-guessed the decision,” he told me this week, speaking between bites of short ribs at a Ruth’s Chris in Midtown Manhattan, where we were having lunch.

He laid out what amounted to three parallel arguments. The first was purely practical. The company’s headquarters in Metairie, a New Orleans suburb, suffered extensive damage when a large section of its roof ripped off. But only about 60 people worked there. Meanwhile, the company had 1,800 employees around the country who needed to be paid. It had logistics to manage, and new restaurants to open. From a corporate point of view, it really didn’t matter where those 60 people worked; all that mattered is whether they could do their jobs efficiently. Clearly, they could work a lot more efficiently in Orlando than in New Orleans.

He also made it clear, though, that he did not view what he had done as an example of heartless corporate behavior. Quite the contrary. The company had paid out $1,000 in cash to every New Orleans employee it could find. It invited virtually everyone who worked in the old headquarters to come to Orlando and take their old jobs. Displaced restaurant workers were encouraged to relocate to a city that had a Ruth’s Chris, where they were guaranteed a job. And so on.

“When you go through something like this, there is a pecking order of priorities,” Mr. Miller said. “Yourself, your family, your employees and your company.” Though he owned a home in the northern suburbs, Mr. Miller’s community wasn’t New Orleans — or any other city. Like many executives, he has lived in a dozen places during his career, and had roots in none of them. Rather, his community was Ruth’s Chris. As he saw it, he hadn’t betrayed New Orleans so much as he’d been loyal to the Ruth’s Chris community.